Richard Lectures

Why and How Deep Learning Still Matters

Francis X. Clooney

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813943121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

We live in an era of unprecedented growth in knowledge. Never before has there been so great an availability of and access to information in both print and online. Yet as opportunities to educate ourselves have greatly increased, our time for reading has significantly diminished. And when we do read, we rarely have the patience to read in the slow, sustained fashion that great books require if we are to be truly transformed by them.

In Reading the Hindu and Christian Classics, renowned Harvard Divinity School professor Francis Clooney argues that our increasing inability to read in a concerted manner is particularly notable in the realm of religion, where the proliferation of information detracts from the learning of practices that require slow and patient reading. Although awareness of the world's many religions is at an all-time high, deep knowledge of the various traditions has suffered. Clooney challenges this trend by considering six classic Hindu and Christian texts dealing with ritual and law, catechesis and doctrine, anddevotion and religious participation, showing how, in distinctive ways, such texts instruct, teach truth, and draw willing readers to participate in the realities they are learning. Through readings of these seminal scriptural and theological texts, he reveals the rewards of a more spiritually transformative mode of reading—and how individuals and communities can achieve it.

TWO

Words of Truth

Reading and Writing Doctrine (Twice Over)

More than Instruction: From Catechesis to Doctrine

When religious people read slowly and deeply in their own tradition, thinking alertly but with an openness to the mysteries of faith, they are formed, even transformed, by that learning. They find a balance between tradition and the present moment, scriptural words and new words freshly written, the individual path alongside a freely chosen submission to an older and more encompassing wisdom. Such dispositions learned with respect to a home tradition recommend that such persons act similarly in reading another tradition with a similar intellectual openness and reverence for the faith of its authors and the wisdom they have appropriated.

Here too slow learning is key. As great religious texts instruct, they make claims on readers by communicating the truth of the tradition in clear, unencumbered terms. Readers within a community and from outside it who are willing to read slowly and properly are led deeper into a body of truths that has been passed down over the centuries, reasserted with clarity and in keeping with authoritative scriptural and traditional sources restated in accord with the needs of changing times.1 The pedagogical concerns introduced already in chapter 1 (and to which we return in chapter 3) remind us that truth needs to be taught properly, so that it can be understood and appropriated by communities and individuals, with due deference to the authority of teachers as key to learning, even if today no teacher ought to want or expect unreflective, blind assent. All of this is to insure that the encounter with truth, in the words of doctrines, is not unduly reduced to what seems true to readers in the current moment. This chapter then is about learning truth through study, through the slow and intelligent learning of doctrine, guided by a master in a first and then in a second tradition.

To say that we learn the truth by study is not as myopic as might seem. Rather, I am thinking of truth as it comes to us in deep dependence on certain texts that we read: truth manifest inside texts, but not cut off from the world or reduced to words about words, as if merely an unending row of interpretations. Properly written doctrines lead us along word’s narrow path, into truths greater than what can be said about them. Using words, not abandoning them, they guide us into mystery, heard now in its doctrinal form according to a long tradition of learning. Speaking of truth—and writing it—stands in a middle position between rigid formulations and insights undisciplined by a tradition’s grammar. Truth in its doctrinal form offers a place for slow, gradual apprehension through prolonged study. By such study, students learn to see the world in a particular way, use words about it in the right way, and affirm that view and that usage to be correct and true.

It is true, of course, that we should not make too much of words, deafly reducing the mystery of God to the words we speak regarding it. Traditions would rot from within were their truths to depend on the abilities of theologians to write of doctrines persuasively or hierarchs to insure their vitality in living communities. But we would hardly be better off were we to decide that words are optional with respect to our encounter with truth—as if silence not only enhances (as it surely does) the work of study here and now but replaces it altogether (as it surely does not, exceptions notwithstanding). Finding the right balance—an attentive and respectful reading that is both patient and humble—is at the heart of the slow reading process I have in mind, and it concludes in truth.

The texts that are most intellectually and spiritually alive are those able to direct our attention to truth, without themselves becoming obstacles. The theological texts most worth reading are therefore those written with both seriousness and humility regarding the limits of language. This learning cannot be rushed, since reflection and appropriation are necessary components of its practice. It is a lifetime in the making, and indeed it depends on the many lives of those willing to take it up over the generations.2

Learning Doctrine across Religious Borders

If the learning of doctrine is conceived of as a matter of study, slow reading, then that learning of the truth of my own tradition is not contrary to learning the truth of another tradition. We have not a clash of truths, but the several truths being learned more deeply, often alongside one another. As we make our way along the path of thinking-words-doctrine-truth in the tradition to which we belong, we learn better how to travel so as to make other such journeys as well. We begin more clearly to see another tradition in a closer approximation to its fullness and then to ponder the new situation, in which we remember and understand doctrine in two traditions at once. My goals here are practical. I do not wish to make a theoretical point about truth, nor to speculate on notions of two-truths, the distinction of the noumenon and phenomena, various forms of theological pluralism, etc., but only to stress once again a practical one about what we do, as we learn properly.3 By study, we submit to the power of the truth in texts, learning how the truth has been accessible to those who study and come to understand claims of truth over centuries and millennia. Only later, after we have begun to learn doctrine several times over—as in this chapter, in a Hindu text and a Christian text—and in the proper way, will we become able to face up to doctrinal conflicts in a mature way where intimacy in learning is at the fore, not posturing from a distance. The truth is a still larger concern, of course, for entire communities; but concern for that truth cannot be so important as to thwart the learning that must take place first.

Reading Brahman, Reading Creation

But enough of preliminaries. We must return now to our primary task, the actual reading of specific texts. For this, I turn to two great teaching/doctrinal texts, Appayya Dīkṣita’s sixteenth-century Collection of Right Perspectives on Our Position (Siddhāntaleśasaṃgraha, henceforth Perspectives)4 and Peter Lombard’s eleventh-century Sentences Articulated in Four Books (Sententiae in Quattuor Libris Distinctae, henceforth Sentences).

Appayya Dīkṣita (1520–1593) was a South Indian from near Kanchipuram (not far from today’s Chennai). Though devotionally a Śaiva, he was expert across a wide range of disciplines and wrote commentaries and analyses with respect to several schools of thought, including Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and Vaiṣṇavism. The Perspectives, as is announced by its title, draws together various authorities whose positions count as “portions” (leśa) of the Advaita overall true position (siddhānta). Peter Lombard (1100–1160), a Roman Catholic theologian, was a longtime scholar and teacher in Paris who became the bishop of Paris for a brief time at the end of his life. In addition to writing the Sentences, he wrote commentaries on the Psalms and some of the letters of St. Paul.

Both authors are exemplary in the work of balancing reading with the recognition of and assent to truth, in continuity with tradition, achieved in the instance of the careful learning of individual readers. Both Dīkṣita and Lombard attend to truth in accord with the language of scripture and tradition, and not as above or beyond words.

Vedānta: The Complexity of a Very Simple Truth

We have already seen in chapter 1 some of the possibilities and limitations regarding generalization and doctrinalization in Mīmāṃsā, overall and with respect to select cases in I.1 and III.5. It would be possible, with some great effort, to extrapolate Mīmāṃsā and Vedic sacrificial doctrines from the practices operative in the Garland, but the result would be rather “artificial, since the mainstream of Mīmāṃsā thinking, grounded in the 907 cases found in the Sūtras, declines to pursue philosophical issues for their own sake and shows little interest even in a philosophy of sacrifice or theology of the transactions with deities. Turning to Dīkṣita’s text, I look instead into the kindred school of Vedānta, which is rightly also known as the “Later Mīmāṃsā” (Uttara Mīmāṃsā) because it brings the hermeneutical principles operative in Mīmāṃsā to bear in the interpretation of the Upaniṣads. These are the later Vedic texts that draw out and emphasize the inner mysteries of self (ātman), the ultimate reality (brahman), and the practices of text-grounded meditation that leads to a higher realization of self as the ultimate reality, or inseparably interior to it. From this recognition, there follows liberation from the body and this world. They are focused, not on sacrificial practice, but rather on the identity and nature of the performer who is liberated from conventional ways of viewing the world and thus too reimagined in relation to much deeper and broader cosmic and divine realities.

More specifically still, I look into the rich and difficult Nondualist (Advaita) Vedānta school (henceforth Advaita), which defends a radical identification of self (ātman) and ultimate reality (brahman). Reality is one without a second, as the Chāndogya Upaniṣad teaches in its sixth chapter (VI.2.1) Advaita is most famously connected with the Vedānta teacher Śaṅkara and is enriched by a wealth of commentaries over the centuries after him and thus too by distillations of Vedānta teachings by scholars such as Dīkṣita.

Systematic in its intentions, and thus like Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta seeks to systematize, articulate, and defend an underlying unity to the Upaniṣadic teachings related to self, brahman, and world. In the background of all Vedānta theology lie the Brahma Sūtras of Bādarāyaṇa. Like Jaimini’s Mīmāṃsā Sūtras introduced in chapter 1, these Sūtras presume a prior oral teaching tradition. They distill those teachings in accord with problematic issues arising in the tradition and, by doing so, facilitate further teaching of the whole of Vedānta mapped according to the plan of the Sūtras. The Brahma Sūtras open with four brief, programmatic, and rather dense statements (clarified a bit my parenthetical comments):

1. 1. Now, then, the desire to know brahman (The topic of the whole inquiry)
2. 2. That whence the birth, etc., of the world (A definition of brahman)
3. 3. Because it is the source of the instructive scriptures5 (The source of right knowledge)
4. 4. It (can be known there) because of harmony. (The rule of inquiry)

Once it is established that brahman can be inquired into by way of a study of the Upaniṣads as text and meditative practice, the serious work of Vedānta proceeds by a network of topics arising in the ensuing four books:6

(In the first book),7 i. cases where there are clear indications of harmony (among all pertinent texts); ii. cases where, though there is a lack of clarity, (harmony can be) gleaned from the object of meditation; iii. cases where what is to be considered is the object of knowledge; and iv. cases where words alone are to be considered. Thus the order in the chapters.

In the second book: i. non-contradiction by tradition or reason; ii. the faultiness of other views; iii. the noncontradictedness of the revelation regarding things (to be enjoyed) and the enjoyer; and iv. noncontradictedness among texts and indications.

In the third book: i. cessation; ii. clarification of the meaning of the words thou and that, the reality of conscious beings and of the highest reality;8 iii. the collecting of qualities (fr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• one
• two
• three
• four
• five
• six
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index